According to the Japanese pattern, all the others in the room should, at that moment, have joined in the beating-up of Celliers. But at that instant the Commander of the prison arrived. Everyone was forced to jump to attention and bow while Celliers himself tried to stand upright. He was left like that for hours, tottering on his feet, while all kinds of officers and officials came and went. One moment it seemed certain that he was about to be killed; the next that the end was still not in sight. At about eleven Yonoi appeared hurrying through the guard room and gave Celliers the same sombre glance before he disappeared into the Commandant’s office. There followed another interminable wait and then the guard who had lent him his cake of soap whispered that Yonoi had asked formally that Celliers should be released to come and take over command of the prisoners in his camp. Yonoi claimed that none of the officers among his prisoners knew how to keep their own men properly in hand. He argued that only a person of Celliers’s quality could impose the discipline needed.
When Celliers told me this, I had suggested at once that perhaps this could explain Yonoi’s interest in him? But Lawrence now said instantly that he thought it to be only a rationalization of a more compelling identification with Celliers. Nonetheless Yonoi really had frequently made it clear to us how unworthy he found our ways in prison. I myself had been conscious that what we needed was a single inspired command, and Yonoi’s rebukes had become harsher as well as harder to bear just before Celliers’s appearance among us. Looking back I have no doubt that he intended to insist that Celliers should be given command over us all, using the argument he had put forward on that vital morning of the interrogation. However, the Kempeitai, who had already hesitated too long to be truly concentrated on the issue, gave way instantly. Yonoi emerged from the Commandant’s office to hurry past Celliers without the expected glance.
This, far from reassuring Celliers made him feel completely hopeless. But he was wrong. Some hours later he was released into our midst, and pushed unceremoniously through the prison gates in the way I have described.
For the first few days in our improvised hospital Celliers slept most of the time, seeming to take his medicine, food and injections without waking. But when he did wake he seemed set on the way to a quick recovery. He would have liked to get up at once to join the rest of us but the doctors insisted that he should stay in hospital for at least another fortnight. He accepted the ruling with good grace and thereafter spent most of his days writing on the sheets of toilet paper with which we supplied him.
All this time Yonoi’s inquiries after Celliers became ever more impatient. It became no longer a tense question of: ‘Sick officer? Health, how?’ but more irritably: ‘Sick officer not well? Why? Why not well? Lakas! Quick! Lakas!’ One evening towards the end of Celliers’s hospital term he was so angry when I reported Celliers as still unfit for prison duty that I thought he was going to hit me. He stood in front of me with a quick intake of breath, hissing between his teeth and rocking his head from side to side. A strange ventriloquist’s growl began to rise in his stomach until he screamed: ‘Officer not well because your spirit bad! All prisoners spirits bad! Spirit so bad nothing grows in prison gardens! All, all, very, very bad.’
He went on like this for a while but he did not hit me. Instead he confined the entire prison camp to its quarters without food or water for twenty-four hours in order that it could reflect on its evil spirit and purify its thinking.
We ended the twenty-four hours in an atmosphere which had sharply deteriorated. The general theory was that we were about to be moved to another camp, an event which always set the nerves of our hosts on edge, involving as it did inspections by higher authorities and a thousand and one other extra administrative chores. Since all moves were preceded by an intensive search of the camp, we took the customary precaution of burying our own essential records under the barrack pavement at night. Celliers’s autobiography, which Lawrence now had on his knees, was buried with the hospital records by the doctors. But even before Celliers came out of his prison-hospital two days later it was evident to me that something more sinister than just a move from one camp to another was involved.
To my dismay, one morning when I went to Yonoi’s headquarters to report, I found that even the friendly staff corporal was incapable of looking me in the eyes. Yonoi himself did not look at us once while he listened to the report, and disdained even to answer our humble requests. Soon the same incapacity for seeing us spread to the Korean sentries. That day and all the next the curious unseeing mechanism gathered momentum until it seemed to me as if Yonoi were moving like a medium fixed in a trance and the sentries goose-stepping between our prison-gate and their quarters like figures walking in their sleep with nightmare exaggerations.
We ourselves became affected with the state of mind of those who had us so absolutely in their power. The youngest among my troops, I noticed, would experience a need to take the nearest friend by the arm as if for reassurance that our prison reality was not an illusion of the insane. Indeed suddenly everything was so terrifyingly unreal and our daily round of circumscribed living so pointless that it needed a determined effort of will to keep our men clean, circumspect and active. Hungry as we all were, many suddenly found their appetites gone, and the very air standing so bright and deep above our opaque walls seemed to go sullen with a charge of new thunder.
That evening our doctors released Celliers from hospital because they felt his condition no longer justified them running any risks with Yonoi’s growing impatience. I had no doubt that whatever was about to happen would happen soon and that nothing we could do would prevent it. That I was not alone in my feeling was evident from the unusual quiet among all ranks in prison. Everyone spoke in a subdued voice as if knowing that we were entering some avalanche country of the spirit where the slightest excess of sound could precipitate a deadly slide of snow and rock on all in the dark valley below.
After our evening rice I walked slowly with Celliers many times around our prison camp. I had already experienced many beautiful evenings in Java but none more beautiful than this. The sun was just going down and beyond our prison walls in the centre of the great plain below our prison camp the tide of purple light was creeping like deep seawater drawn by the moon up the slopes of the great Mountain of Malabar. Its crown, so like the ramparts of the great Crusader Fortress of Craques Chevalier which Celliers had seen on the edge of the Holy Land, was blazing with light. The sky itself was a deep emerald ocean wherein an immense thunder cloud was bearing down on the mountain, a very dreadnought of war, sails all set and swollen with the wind that drives so high over the becalmed earth of Java fragrant with the sandalwood and spice of the outer islands and smooth as silk with streamlined light. The dark base of the cloud itself shuddered with its burden of thunder like a hull with the shock of seas breaking over the prow, and the lightning flashed among the golden sails with the constancy of a signaller’s lamp. Just beyond our prison walls the dark spathodias which lined the invisible roads outside were in full bloom and their scarlet flowers flickered like flames of fire from the tremble which the distant broadsides of lightning and thunder though inaudible to us imparted to the sensitive air.
The going down of the sun, the purposeful advance of the cloud and the stirring of those flowers among the dark leaves filled the evening with a great feeling of eventfulness and somehow stressed our own cast-iron exclusion from the normal rhythm of things. As it grew dark the bats one by one dropped headlong from their sunless attics in the dark trees and instantly began to beat about the dying day in their flight from one black hole to another. Soon they were joined by the Titans of their world, the flying foxes, and together they emitted sub-sonic shrieks of alarm that were like tears of taut silk in the throbbing silences. They made the evening feel ugly, bewitched and old, and I was relieved when Celliers drew my attention to the evening star which was hanging so large and bright in the faded track of the sun that it looked as if it might fall from sheer weight out of the shuddering sky.